Backup or archiving? Maybe you need both!

Are you wondering whether your company needs an archiving solution or a backup? What is the difference between them and can both be helpful in comprehensive data protection? What are the decision-making methods and which ones should be implemented in the organization? Read our article to expand your knowledge and choose what is best for your company!

Simply put, backups are for recovery and archiving is for discovery.

Both solutions have their advantages: backup is best for business-critical items that are updated and accessed frequently and require protection against malicious attacks and accidental deletion. Archiving, on the other hand, preserves important communications that need to be indexed and searched for legal or compliance reasons. While there is overlap between the two, each solution is optimized to get you the data you need quickly.

Here's a quick comparison between backup and archive:

Backup

• Shares a copy of data,
• Helps you recover contacts, tasks, calendars, documents
• Protects your data from disaster or accidental deletion.

Archiving:

• Provides a communication repository,
• Speeds up the e-discovery process by quickly scanning social media, text messages, emails and other collaboration-related messages,
• It ensures the security of your communications when you need to store them for a long time.

In summary, backup is for recovery and archive is for discovery. These two solutions complement each other to protect your organization and its data from internal and external threats.

Decide what's best for your business

While both backup and archiving maintain an immutable copy of your data with unlimited retention time, each solution is designed and optimized for different purposes. Before making a decision, there are a few questions you should ask:

Who needs data and why?

Sometimes we may need to quickly recover business-critical workpapers, meetings and contacts in the event of an attack or failure. To quickly receive them in their original format, you can use a backup copy.

However, if you are looking for an email whose attachment contains the word "health care", an archiving solution can quickly scan the messages and help you find what you need.

Where should the data be redirected?

Would there be any disruption to your business if you were unable to access or restore your data? For example, if you want to share such communication with your lawyer via e-mail or Teams messenger, archiving it is the best solution. However, if you need to restore your data, you should create a backup.

How long do you need to store data?

Do you need a copy of data from a week, a month or several years ago? Do you need to keep an unchanged version? Both archiving and backup solutions allow you to store data for longer periods of time. However, answers to the questions about how long you need them and in what format will help you determine which tool you need.

Advantage

OpenText combines the best solutions that will help companies remain resistant to all types of attacks. Combined with MailStore and Webroot, Carbonite provides the tools you need to effectively manage your data no matter where it lives – all while ensuring compliance with changing regulations.

To learn more about the Carbonite solution, as well as other OpenText tools, contact Damian Malinowski, who is the supervisor of this group in our company.